I asked this in the other thread already, but let me ask again.
So as startup founders, what do you guys think is the right move here? Do you do what your users want, or stand your ground and do what you think is best for the company??
So as startup founders, what do you guys think is the right move here? Do you do what your users want, or stand your ground and do what you think is best for the company??
But as Digg has millions of users already, what your users want is the same thing as what is best for the company. You say sorry and revert back to the old site, then have a long hard think about what you did wrong and how to avoid making that mistake ever again.
They need to see if they're being attacked my a vocal minority or a true majority. If it's the latter, a revert should happen. If the former, they should consider standing their ground.
See every major change Facebook has ever done. When people exploded about the privacy implications of having a news feed (Oh no!), should Facebook have punted?
The changes to Digg are very questionably for the benefit of the end-user. I'm not sure what Kevin and Digg hoped to achieve by having publishers directly spamming the Digg front page with content. It's a very rudimentary, very poor, RSS reader, and the anti-thesis of what Digg was about, user-selected stories from all over the web. I can only think Digg are getting an affiliate kickback from the larger publishers.
I'm not a disgruntled Digg user; I abandoned it for Reddit about 3 months ago, and I haven't looked back. It seems to me the small Reddit team know their users pretty well (see the way they handled Prop 14 without the need for a user revolt). I honestly wonder exactly who Digg think they are serving with v4.
I fully expect to see a similar scenario play out on Reddit at some point.
By essentially allowing their sponsors to decide what's going to be on their front page, they've changed digg from a crowdsourced editorial board to a sponsored RSS feed. I can't remember the last time a .com made such a shortsighted decision....I can't see digg even being around in a few years after this.
Digg went from all about being user submitted content to an RSS reader where a lot of posts are auto submitted by blogs and ends up on the front page.
I think the people in charge stopped thinking about what's best for the company long ago in favor of what's best for themselves. That also needs to be reversed.
The only big feature that I can think of where Facebook backed down is Beacon.
It's important to listen to users, but Facebook has shown that it's also important to ignore them at times.
(Note that what your users want is not always the same as what they say they want.)